Walter Osborne: Apple Gathering, Quimperlé
Weep for the green orchards of northern France
before the two world wars, their apple-rich largesse
bound ripely to the sap and to the sun
in fertile villages. At Quimperlé,
two girls are harvesting a tree bent sideways
by the weight of apples, one wielding a long stick
to bring them to earth, the other in her wake,
bending to gather. Just now their backs are turned
to the blockish bell-tower on the hill.
They seem composed in their rough working clothes,
and are aiming to fill that barrow with a fresh
cargo of apples. The promise of baking and brewing
is a scent in the air, and the prospect of rest
after, say, one more tree, is what keeps them going.
Each of them will wipe an apple on her dress
and close her eyes and eat it slowly
until the ringing of the angelus bell
sets them moving to the next tree. Now their work has a taste,
now they can taste the work of the orchard
and will soon, for all we know, begin to sing
as their arms resume stretching.
Weep for the green orchards of northern France
before the two world wars …
Frank Ormsby’s multi-stranded new collection, The Darkness of Snow, ranges over five parts, each composed of thematically connected poems or sequences. Memories of a Catholic boyhood in Enniskillen predominate in Part I, its epigraph a characteristically rueful quotation from one of the ensuing poems: “Where I grew up / the fields had names.” The focus in Part IV is the poet’s experience of the early stages of Parkinson’s disease, and the final section, The Willow Forest, concerns itself with a fictional war-crimes tribunal whose participants bear witness from different perspectives. While such themes might promise a long descent into suffering and seriousness, Ormsby brings humour and lightness of touch to his personal writing, and lifts the darkness of snow at apt moments throughout the collection. There’s a further source of light and colour: a glorious third section devoted to poems about art, Twenty-Six Irish Paintings. This is where my eye finally settled to select this week’s poem.
Ormsby’s source was Julian Campbell’s exhibition catalogue, The Irish Impressionists: Irish Artists in France and Belgium, 1850-1914. Brittany was a favoured location for many of these artists and it seems, from the ease and confidence of his writing, that Ormsby may know and love the region as intimately as they. Whatever the setting, his poems are always scrupulous representations of the paintings. Easily located online, which is some compensation for not having them to hand in the collection, the pictures add up to a revelation of the underpraised achievement of Irish impressionism.
Walter Osborne: Apple Gathering, Quimperlé is number three in the ekphrastic series and is both a war poem – of a kind – and a lament for a lost culture, pre-industrial, and seemingly prelapsarian. Ormsby’s chant, “Where I grew up / the fields had names”, echoes the rhythm of the opening couplet of Louis MacNeice’s Autobiography. (“In my childhood, trees were green / And there was plenty to be seen.”) And MacNeice’s and Ormsby’s lines echo distantly in the enchanted “green orchards” of Quimperlé. At such an unguarded apex of fecundity and simplicity, we might also remember Larkin’s “Never such innocence again.”
Ormsby resists intrusion on the paintings he selects. He stands discreetly back but, as their gently observant elucidator, he sets the painted figures in motion, and rearranges the stillness captured by brushstrokes to reflect the poet’s concept of narrative time. In Apple Gathering, after the exhortation of the first line, to “Weep for the green orchards of northern France / Before the two world wars” he plunges us into locality, the rhythm of the seasons and the working day. It’s harvest time, the apples are ripe, and there’s a certain leisurely pressure to accomplish the work, with a future purpose, economic but also pleasurable, of “baking and brewing”. The angelus bell provides the two girl-labourers with a way of dividing their work into manageable portions.
Richard Doody writes that: “A million Bretons answered the French call to arms in the first world war. A quarter of them never returned. Bretons were killed and wounded at a rate twice the national average.” But the poet’s retrospective awareness of the devastations inflicted by both world wars is not allowed to overshadow the painting’s innocence. Osborne died long before the war, of course, in 1903. He was politically an even-handed painter, equally scrupulous in depicting scenes of middle-class and working-class life, more interested in his medium than any message. The girls he painted at Quimperlé are clearly poor, but not obviously oppressed: and the land itself, or what we see of it, so far unbetrayed, rests calmly under the protection of the church and “the blockish bell-tower” looming on the hill above.
Ormsby takes Osborne’s narrative further. His apple-gatherers achieve a perfect unity of nature and labour when they bite into the apple and find that “now their work has a taste, / now they can taste the work of the orchard”. The joyous focus remains unspoiled. The largesse of the late summer orchard is not exaggerated, but it is heightened.
War artists such as Paul Nash, and artist-poets such as David Jones, did lasting work in this eco-elegiac dimension. With the humbler journalists, they have branded war’s “outrage on nature” into human consciousness, at least for present generations. We imagine battlefields and see not only mangled human corpses but trees reduced to hideous splinters. Ormsby needs only the simple refrain-like exhortation to show us these things. But first he transfixes time with an angelic image of the girls stretching upwards and “for all we know” starting to sing. After which moment the only song is a keen, and the orchards vanish into smoke and mud.
